In my last post, I wrote about the evolving need for big business to source generic capabilities from business partners/vendors. This shift provides an enormous opportunity as well as a threat for technology vendors and CIOs.

I’m not talking about the wholesale outsourcing of IT. Rather, the selective sourcing of business capabilities and business process through software-as-a-service (SaaS), most likely deployed through cloud-based platforms (capability-as-a-service, or CaaS). Software and hardware vendors need to rethink their business from the customer’s perspective. They must figure out how to transform their products into services that deliver business capabilities and business outcomes.

If you’re a tech vendor, this means that you need to analyze each target industry and determine which business capabilities are likely to be strategic, and which are most likely to be generic. In retailing, for example, strategic capabilities might center on mastering customer data to create unique and valuable customer experiences as well as price optimization. Whereas capabilities around merchandising and assortment planning may be generic across many retailers (even though most merchandisers I know would never admit to this), these generic capabilities are likely to be delivered as SaaS in the future.

If you have existing solutions that target an industry’s generic capabilities, they are prime candidates for delivering the capability to the market as a service. Where your solutions target strategic capabilities, you will need to provide highly customized services through strategic partnership arrangements.

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On Tuesday of this week, Microsoft launched Office 2013, the latest version of its flagship productivity suite. Forrester has released a report entitled Office 2013: A Breakthrough in Productivity; I had the opportunity to work with some great Forrester minds on writing it. Each analyst brought a unique perspective to the analysis:

My work, in addition to corralling all the talent mentioned below, focuses on document collaboration and social.

John Rymer’s work is in the analysis of the new development environment with specific focus on SharePoint.

Ted Schadler focuses on the current and emerging mobile experience.

Art Scholler provides excellent perspective on the role of Office 2013 in unified communications with a focus on Lync.

Phillip Karcher takes a close look at the next version of the productivity suite.

Frank Gillett looks at the implications of cloud deployment.

Chris Voce looks specifically at Exchange and provides perspective on the operational environment in general.

Leslie Owens provides perspective on search, taxonomy, and information architecture in the new release.

More than 22 years ago, I met my amazing wife and was welcomed into her wonderful family. At the time, I was a project manager working for Lotus Consulting. I managed the rollout of large Lotus Notes implementations as well as the development of Notes applications. Over the years, I had many great conversations with my father-in-law, Jerry. He was a senior executive at CalTrans (California’s department of transportation), but earlier in his career he had also been a project manager. Did we do the same job? Well, not really. I rolled out email systems. He managed a little project called Interstate Highway 5 from the Oregon border to Mexico — California’s portion of a 1,381 mile stretch of road. While he was far too gracious and modest a person to say so, the scale, complexity, and risk that he managed were far beyond anything I could even imagine. Nevertheless, he spoke to me as a peer and I was honored that he did so.

One of my favorite stories from Jerry was how he drove the introduction of PCs at CalTrans in the late 1980s. At the time, his engineers were wedded to two primary business tools: drafting tables and computing power, the latter of which was purchased from a California government service provider called the Teale Data Center. Jerry recognized two things: Drafting tables were inherently inefficient and the Teale Data Center was really expensive. He saw an opportunity with the emergence of personal computing. Move common tasks done on paper to a computer and move expensive processing to local PCs. The engineers resisted the change. “It will never work!” they cried.

The long, much-delayed wait is over. Today RIM took the formal wraps off its new BB10 platform and the first two smartphones running the OS: the all-touch Z10 and the Q10 that will carry the much-loved RIM physical keyboard. RIM has learned at least one lesson from Apple: their launch event included details on launch dates, carrier availability, and pricing. My colleague Thomas Husson has offered a viewpoint on BB10 for product and marketing specialists here.

The good news: RIM's hardware and software rise to the level of their competition, and in some cases — such as the keyboard's prediction and multilingual support — far surpass it; the BB10 catalog of applications, while smaller by an order of magnitude than the selection available for Apple and Android devices, is large and covers a broad range of business and consumer experiences; the platform is designed for a BYOD world, providing support for work and personal identities with an easy-to-access approach (provided the enterprise chooses BES); and RIM has struck deals with a wide range of content providers to offer customers a selection of music, video, and news content.

The Z10 is a beautiful device: designers Todd Wood, Don Lindsay, and their teams have done a great job with the industrial design, the swipe-rich interaction gestures, and a whole lot more. The Z10 is a pleasure to hold, to swipe, and to carry around in a suit pants pocket.

Here are my favorite bits:

Thin, light, elegant, executive, with a holdable form factor and case.

The keyboard, with its predictive word look up and "flip into place" word completion is a pleasure for this thick-thumbed, fumble-finger typer.

Swipe gestures, including peeking into the inbox, the slow swipe to home position, and the pulldown configuration are a pleasure to use one-handed.

Mobile apps have the thorny problem of needing to work spectacularly and safely on any device over the last wireless mile. Systems integrators, interactive agencies, software vendors, and your own infrastructure and application development teams will pitch you endlessly on technology to handle these problems. Some of these technology solutions will be great. But others carry traps for the unwary. In our new report, we call out 7 pitfalls and describe 7 mobile-first alternatives that are better.

One big trap lurking in most firms’ mobile strategy is using MDM to indiscriminately lock down devices. The temptation to replicate the BlackBerry era will backfire. Remember that RIM’s controls is partly what spurred employees and executives to defect to iPhones. If you lock mobile devices down too tightly, you will be pummeled for putting a theoretical concern for information security ahead of usability and the practical reality of a productive mobile workforce. If people can’t immediately get what they need, they’ll leave the phone in their pocket.

Figure 1: 7 Pitfalls To Avoid

Print out this list of pitfalls and their alternatives and tape it your monitor. Or blow it up and post it in your mobile center of excellence. Here are two pitfalls for everybody to avoid:

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It's been clear for years now that small business startups don't build massive IT departments and big operations teams. Instead they focus on the capabilities which truly differentiate them in the marketplace - their strategic capabilities. They hire experts in these capabilities as employees and continue to improve their differentiation. At the same time, they look to source their more generic business capabilities from business partners and technology service providers.

We are going to see a seismic shift in big business in the coming years: there will be an increasing appetite to source generic capabilities from vendors and business partners; at the same time CEOs will focus increasingly scarce human capital resources on improving their strategic capabilities - the capabilities which give them a competitive edge.

While digital technology will remain at the heart of these strategic capabilities - leveraging cloud, big data analytics, mobile and social - the majority of technology services will be sourced from partners and vendors. The company's own technology resources will become more and more intensely focused on developing unique systems of engagement around strategic capabilities.

“Telecommuting” and flexible work spaces are nothing new. I’ve worked from home, from public libraries, airport lounges, and even Sun Microsystem’s iWork Cafes and drop-in centers for the past 10 years. Companies have been (and are increasingly) giving employees the flexibility to choose where they work. If someone wants to work from a cafe in the morning before a client meeting, reserve a table in the campus cafeteria for a chat with a colleague at noon, and work from a co-work or drop-in space near their child’s daycare at the end of the day, they can do that. What is new is the ability to reserve all of those different workspaces with a single tool – and in real time.

I had a great discussion with the team from LiquidSpace yesterday to learn more about how they work. They provide a marketplace for those with work spaces to offer and individuals looking for alternative work sites. “Just as Open Table is a platform used by restaurants, we are a similar real-time platform for workplaces,” explained Mark Gilbreath, the LiquidSpace CEO and co-founder. “We are not an owner of space. We are the tool to connect users and space.” And, those workplaces can include both public spaces – such as hotel meeting rooms, executive suites like Regus or co-work spaces – as well as private spaces on a company’s campus or meeting rooms within a residential building or development.

At the beginning of this year, I took the time to sit down with my colleague Thomas Husson, vice president and principal analyst on Forrester's consumer product strategy team and a specialist in the telecom space, to discuss the top trends that will affect the European telco landscape this year.

Although we believe that the business/consumer split is increasingly vanishing, we decided to split the top 10 carrier themes that will matter in the European telco market in 2013 by enterprise and consumer perspectives.

In the enterprise segment, we see five main themes:

Over-the-top (OTT) and app-based communication services will become part of the IT landscape. OTT voice, social media, and messaging will spread in the enterprise space at the expense of traditional services. Our research shows that professional workers who travel are the most likely to embrace application-based communication services, often irrespective of what their company’s official IT policy is. Still, 2013 will not be the year (yet) that sees rich communication suites (RCSes) becoming a B2B2C communications platform.

Cloud-based enterprise services by carriers will see increasing interest from businesses. Communication-as-a-service will receive increased attention by CIOs as they plan unified communications and collaboration (UCC) projects. However, as our research shows, carriers will not be perceived as the top choice of providers for cloud-based services. Mobile device management firms like AirWatch and MobileIron will offer reselling opportunities for carriers but limit the carriers’ ability to add value around device and app store management. Business models for cloud-based data analytics of end user demand will grow in importance in 2013 but will only begin to materialize on a larger scale in 2014.

Yesterday the Kenyan president broke ground on a new smart city development outside of Nairobi. The site of the new Konza Techno City is located in Eastern Kenya, 60 km from Nairobi on the Nairobi-Mombasa Road. It is 50 km from Jomo Kenyatta International airport and 500km from Mombasa and its ports. The greenfield site, purchased by the Ministry of Information and Communication and to be managed by the Konza Technopolis Development Authority, extends over 5,000 acres.

The primary goal of the new city is to develop the Kenyan Business Process Outsourcing and Information Technology Enabled Services (BPO/ITES) industry – with estimated creation of 200,000 new jobs across the broad technology and related sectors over a 20-year period. But the primary objective is to create at least 82,000 jobs in the BPO sector as this is a key area for Kenya's Vision 2030. The new city will also house a university, recreation and entertainment venues, a film and media center, a financial district, as well as residential neighborhoods and the supporting infrastructure.